Getting it together

For these efforts bear fruit, there is obviously a big need to attract and retain top people. "Excellent scientists are an essential component," Wigzell says. "If you don't fight for these people, your university will die." And while the resources available in the Nordic nations may not match those in the US, "you can show the researchers that you really want to support them", Wigzell says.

A case in point is the neural stem cell expert Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska. In 2000, when Frisen was tempted by an offer from the US, Sweden's research organisations pulled out all the stops to keep him in Stockholm. The Tobias Foundation, founded by Swedish businessman Marcus Storch in memory of his son who died of leukaemia, funded a professorship at the Karolinska and the running costs of Frisen's lab.

But Frisen says that money was not the deciding factor in his decision to stay in Sweden. "There was much more cash to go to the US, so money was definitely not the reason I stayed." Sweden is a good place to do science, Frisen says and the country's recent enthusiasm for the commercialisation of research was part of the attraction. In 1998 Frisen and his colleague Ann Marie Janson founded the company NeuroNova to exploit the regenerative potential of stem cells to find new ways to treat disorders of the central nervous system.

Attracting researchers to the region from abroad is an even tougher challenge (New Scientist, 21 June 2003, p 58), possibly because the region seems remote to outsiders. But international collaborations could help change this. "Once you develop good relationships, this leads to others being interested. It's a snowball effect," says Kjell Hauge of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in Oslo, a centre of excellence for engineering geology.

The NGI boasts more nationalities among its staff than most Nordic organisations. Its managing director, Suzanne Lacasse, who was previously head of the geotechnical laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is French Canadian. And the director of the NGI's International Centre of Geohazards is Farrokh Nadim, originally from Iran.

Looking to the future, the Nordic countries might find some distinct advantages in their location as the EU expands to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden. Research projects linking scientists from the new member countries are already under way. The Bonus project to help clean up pollution in the Baltic is one of the big examples, co-funded to the tune of €3 million by the EU.

This may be local science but it's not small science. As the Nordic countries have proved, if a small country wants to be an international player in science then it pays to collaborate.

The finnish line

Half a century ago, Finland was a largely rural economy, and the majority of Finns worked on the land. Now that figure is around 5 per cent, and Finland is a textbook model of an advanced industrial economy.

"In the late 1960s, the level of technology was not high, with investment in R&D well below the OECD average," says Pekka Pellinen, director of the Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers. The critical time was the 1980s, when the government began investing in science with the aim of promoting research in high-tech fields and creating a knowledge-based society. "Gradually Finland overtook, country by country, and now about 3.5 per cent of our GDP is spent on R&D," says Pellinen.

This boost to R&D was crucial, and set the scene for the subsequent high-tech boom epitomised by the growth Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia. "We created a knowledge base in the public sector and so made it possible for the private sector to capitalise in the late 1980s, particularly in the technology sector," says Pellinen.

Now Finland is pinning its hopes on biotechnology. The country's biotech industry ranks sixth in Europe, with around 100 companies. Most, however, are small and young. Two Turku-based companies - Hormos Medical, specialising in hormone-based therapies, and BioTie Therapies, which focuses on anti-addiction treatments - are among the brightest stars. But even they are some years away from bringing a product to market.

The scientific standards and the level of government support are high, says Saara Hassinen of Finnish Bioindustries, the country's biotechnology industry association. But for Hassinen a vital ingredient is missing: venture capital. Finland does not have a well-developed investment community, so the country's biotechs need to attract investors from abroad.

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